John Schinnerer
2 min readOct 26, 2024

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It's not girls and women ruining everything, of course. Our problems are much bigger than that. Most of what you've likely read and viewed is trapped within too small a context. A couple thoughts:

"Hasn’t education has always required the ability to be quiet and attentive for long periods? And hasn’t it always demanded skills like time management and focus for student success?"

"Always," no way, not even close. Only since human learning with/in human societies became industrialized, institutionalized, and commodified as "education" - which has been for only a tiny fraction of human existence. Industrialized commodified education is damaging to all of us, one way or another. Attempting to make humans behave like machines, and boys like girls and vice versa and allowing no other options than 'boy' or 'girl', and assuming all should behave the same, 'learn' the same things in large groups, at the same biological age - that is madness, inhuman, and inhumane. Also, stupid. That's a root problem. What we are seeing is increasing symptoms of this inhumane "education" system we've created.

As to young males, our "education" system fails and even abuses them (and everyone else, to be sure), but again necessary context is much bigger. When someone is an adult, we can expect self-discipline and self-regulation. But how does one become an adult in our society? Mostly, any more, one does not. We have forgotten, thrown away, marginalized, or killed off virtually all people and cultures who knew how to make adults of children. Especially, it seems, males. Young males struggle with perpetual adolescence because our culture allows it, even encourages it. We are no longer capable, as a society, of making men out of boys. And only a society - a healthy culture - can do this. No individual can by themselves. The patriarchal tropes of "education," "career," and material wealth are ultimately hollow, and as has become obvious in recent decades, can be achieved without maturing beyond adolescent behavior. Young males are aware - some consciously, most not - that there is something missing for them in our society, something that is visceral and ancient and essential to their well-being and maturation. They may or may not know that they are attempting to become adults. They may seek inadequate substitutes - gangs, the military, cults, fundamentalist religions, and so on. Regardless, our society offers them nothing of value to that end, beyond "good luck!" or worse yet "why can't you get your act together?" As though they alone were responsible for that happening. Which, in our pathologically individualistic society, they are expected to be (in the same way that the poor and the un-housed are made individually responsible for our collective failure to create a just and fair society). It takes a village - and, there is ALWAYS a village. But what is the nature of that village? What does it teach, who does it serve, who does it fail to serve?

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John Schinnerer
John Schinnerer

Written by John Schinnerer

A generalist in a hyper-specialized society. "How we do what we do is who we are becoming." - Humberto Maturana

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